[ mail followup to: -women, please continue discussion there ]
TL;DR: we've been invited to participate into GNOME Outreach Program for
Women and I'd like to accept the invitation. To maximize impact, though,
we need mentors and topics to complement the current GSoC tasks.
----
GNOME Outreach Program for Women (OPW) is a great internship initiative,
by GNOME, initially for GNOME internship only, but which has recently
been extended to other FOSS projects. If you don't know about it but are
interested in this conversation, please have a look at [1], and in
particular at [2].
[1]: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
[2]: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen#For_Organizations_and_Companies
A couple of days before my trip at LibrePlanet, I've been contacted by
Karen Sandler (Cc:-ed, in case I mess up something :-)) for inviting
Debian to participate in the program. To that end we need (a) some money
(entry level is ~5,500 USD for 1 internship), (b) internship topics, and
(c) mentors. As one of my last act as DPL I'll be more than happy to
approve using Debian money for 1 OPW internship, hoping it will prove
successful and that we can expand our participation even further in next
years. So we "just" lack b/c :-)
At LibrePlanet, I've discussed the matter further with Karen and it
turns out that, first, we have a bit more time for the internship topics
than the strict timeline suggests: application deadline for interns is
May 1st, it'll be enough to have topics/mentors around April 10th. Also,
it is quite comment, and welcome, to have some overlap with GSoC that
will be ongoing during the same period.
We can for instance include GSoC tasks in the pool of OPW internship
topics. Of course we should better not accept two students (1 OPW and 1
GSoC) for the same tasks. But we can propose to worthy GSoC candidates
to do the internship as OPW _instead_, or we can let them do their GSoC
and "label" their participation as OPW internship.
However, note that an important aspect of OPW is that there is no "code"
restriction. So while I think we should *also* propose GSoC tasks as
part of it, it would be way more interesting to add non-coding tasks to
them, therefore offering a wider range of choices to OPW candidates. But
for that, we do need topics and mentors. Could be anything useful to
Debian, from coding to artwork, from communication to accounting, from
management to packaging, anything that would provide a GSoC-like, but
broader in scope, internship experience. And, the most important part,
would help in increasing women participation in Debian, something on
which we've been working for a very long time. (FWIW, GNOME's
experiences on the usefulness of OPW are quite impressive, see
LibrePlanet 2013 talk by Marina Zhurakhinskaya.)
I don't feel like piggybacking this extra work, rather last minute, onto
the shoulders of the GSoC admins. Ideally, this is something that should
be coordinated by someone on -women, in coordination with GSoC admins
for dealing with the cases at the crossing of the two initiatives.
Anyone up to it?
Even if you're not, but you do have internship topics and mentors to
propose, please mention it. It might be good enough to have just a few
topics in addition to the GSoC tasks, as long as we have mentors for all
of them. In that case I might help with the remaining coordination part
myself (but not with mentoring, sorry, I'm already taken for GSoC this
year).
Thanks for your help,
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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